Equestria Daily
Equestria Daily is a fansite dedicated to postings of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic news, fan fiction, pictures, music, and comics. The site is run with a blog-style interface by a dedicated team of several editors, and has been officially recognized by the show's production team as well as The Hub, the American children's network on which the show airs.__TOC__ History A 23-year-old Arizonan college student going by "Sethisto" established the website in January 2011 to collect fan fiction and news specific to the show My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. He has explained that he believed the show needed a unified fan base at this critical time, as he and many other twenty- to thirty-year-old males had recently become supporters of the show – known as 'bronies' – and an overarching concern was that Hasbro, the copyright owners of the My Little Pony franchise, would not be authorizing a second season. Towards the end of 2010, when the fan-following was still in its infancy and confined mostly to the /co/ and /b/ boards of English imageboard 4chan, all pony-related content was banned by a moderator who had had enough of the flame war that was being waged between those who enjoyed the show and those who did not. Posting a message containing the word 'pony' became a bannable offense, and this was the final stimulus that prompted Sethisto to begin Equestria Daily. In addition, regarding video-gaming blogs Joystiq and Kotaku, Sethisto has said in a FAQ post on his website that he "always wanted to either join one or run one himself." After its creation, the blog quickly gained attention from the fan community. Although Sethisto ran it solely himself to start with, more and more fans began sending news and updates to him, and the workload increased. By the end of June 2011, the site's staff had been expanded to include two more blog editors and an 'interviewer/YouTube organizer', all drawn from the user base of dedicated blog followers. By this point, the website was garnering around 300,000 additional page views per day, and with the supplementary editors was managing to post a greater number of updates with increased frequency, though still primarily of fan fiction. Equestria Daily has also partially branched into other forms of media dissemination, currently possessing a Facebook page, YouTube account and Twitter account, though all updates are still hosted on the originally-established Blogger site. As of the beginning of October 2011, the site boasts over 50 million hits since its creation in January. The site receives enough pageviews per day that it is able to sustain itself through advertising revenue. The site reached 200,000,000 total views on June 22, 2012. On March 15, 2013, an app version of the site was launched for both iOS and Android. On March 26 of the same year, the app was updated to version 1.0.5, on April 28, the app was updated to version 1.1, and on July 1, the app was updated to version 1.1.2. On September 12, 2013, knighty published a re-design of Equestria Daily, after convincing Seth to allow him to do it. It includes such features as a parallax scrolling background for the top banner, and a navigation bar that stays at the top of the page when the page itself is scrolled down. Charges Equestria Daily editors have called several times on its readers to stuff ballots of on-line polls under the term charge. Official response The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic production team at DHX Media Vancouver, as well as the network which broadcasts the show, The Hub, have both acknowledged the existence of the fan community, and have individually sent official material specifically to Equestria Daily. The Hub had a summer advertising campaign for the show based around a parody of Katy Perry's "California Gurls" called "Equestria Girls", and an extended promotional version of the song was sent to Equestria Daily for "our favorite Pony fans." Hasbro themselves sent a review copy of their interactive iOS storybook "Twilight Sparkle: Teacher for a Day" to Equestria Daily, and several key figures in the production team have done exclusive interviews for the website, including supervising director and current showrunner Jayson Thiessen and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic developer and creative director Lauren Faust. Emily Manuel of GlobalComment wrote that scanning the site for fan-created works got her through the long wait until the next season. Sethisto was also briefly featured on an episode of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Sections The website has several categories, sorting posts by "Art", "News", "Fics", "Media", and "Comics". Because of the high volume of fan fiction updates, the site features a "Not-Fanfiction" switch, enabling readers to avoid those posts. Regular features of the blog include: *Story Updates: a summary of short stories on Equestria Daily that received recent updates *Drawfriend Stuff: a gallery of often more than 50 pony images from around the web *Nightly Roundup: a collection of smaller news items not important enough for a blog post of their own *Custom Pony Compilation: a compilation of custom ponies fans have made *Wallpaper Compilation: each of these posts has a collection of pony desktop wallpapers *Q&Neigh: a podcast done by the three main contributors The site features several chatrooms for different topics, which can all be found here. Contributors The Equestria Daily staff consists of the main staff (called "Blogponies") and a large number of fanfiction pre-readers. Current Main Staff *Sethisto (Admin) *Calpain (Admin) *Cereal Velocity (Admin, also provides tech support) *Phoe *CouchCrusader *Aquaman *Hypermark (also provides tech support) *Gameleon (also the site's app developer) *The Ferret *Allyster Black (also an artist) *We Are Borg *Pinipy (Artist) Former Staff * Xyro XT1 (Retired) * Kryptonlogic (Retired) * PK (Retired) * BeeBarb (Passed away on July 20, 2016) Spin-off websites On January 16, 2015, Sethisto launched a sister site to Equestria Daily called "Desu Daily" that focuses on anime. In a later post he stated that it would not affect Equestria Daily's operation in any way. Galleries *Banners *Halloween 2011 banners *December 2011 banners References External links * Equestria Daily * Equestria Daily with no-fanfiction switch activated Category:Websites Category:Fandom Category:Equestria Daily